“It looks like its holding up the clouds.” “It’s like a sky jelly fish.” “I love how the light moves across it along with the sound.”

These were some of the comments heard at TED2014 about Skies Painted with Unnumbered Sparks, a collaboration between sculptor Janet Echelman and data artist Aaron Koblin. This monumental sculpture stretched 745 feet, from the Vancouver Convention Centre where TED was held, over an open-air plaza on the edge of the city’s bay and up to the top of the Fairmont Waterfront hotel. Every night during the conference, dozens of people could be seen across the street setting up cameras and tripods to capture the glowing spectacle. Meanwhile, underneath the sculpture, even greater numbers of people gathered, most of them with their cell phones out…